Conventional marine surveying is performed in a variety of approaches. One marine surveying approach involves the use of manned vessels or vehicles to collect samples. See, e.g., American Standards and Testing Association's Standard Practice D4489. However, such sampling approaches are expensive due to the vessel deployment requirements and the number of samples is limited by the amount of time a vessel and its crew can remain on the body of water to perform operations. Further, samples obtained from the manned vessel's operations may fail to obtain samples from a target of interest or include samples that are compromised due to marine vessel traffic or other disturbances. As a result, the conventional approaches may provide a limited coverage area, may require certain amounts of lead time to prepare and deploy the vessel and crew, may involve additional verification steps to confirm a target of interest is present because of the delays in deployment, and may provide limited flexibility for adjusting a course plan or trajectory during operations (e.g., real-time or concurrent adjustments). As such, manned marine surveying approaches have various limitations for surveying operations.
Another marine surveying approach may involve using monitoring equipment coupled to a buoy. This approach may be utilized to obtain different types of measurements, such as temperature, wind speed, current, or basic water chemistry from a location. However, such approaches are not particularly useful for acquiring samples for sophisticated measurements or advanced characterization, which may involve land-based laboratory analysis. Specifically, the buoys merely provide instantaneous information from a static location, and may only capture discrete samples (if at all). The use of buoys does not provide a means to adjust the buoys position to intercept a potential target, a means to provide geochemical data confirming the presence of target materials, a means to reserve the sampling apparatus for capturing representative samples of the chemical, hydrocarbon and/or biological target, or a means to ascertain target presence and abundance in the area of interest. In addition, identifying temporal and spatial variation of targets is implausible, given that the number and distribution of buoys is limited and may not provide needed information, such as geochemical information or sampling resolution necessary to capture specific conditions, target compositions, or transformations that may occur within the water column or at the water surface (e.g., evaporation and/or ultraviolet induced degradation). As such, the monitoring equipment approaches have various limitations in performing surveying operations.
Yet another approach for marine surveying may include remote sensing coupled with a sampling operations. This approach may be used to identify possible features of interest (e.g., oil slicks from seeps, red tide or a chemical pollutant) or wildlife (e.g., invasive, rare, threatened or endangered species locations). The remote sensing may be performed indirectly (e.g., with satellite or airborne imaging) or directly (e.g., via observations and sampling from a marine vessel). Then, a marine vessel can be deployed with a manned crew to determine the location of the observation and to obtain samples. However, similar to the discussion above regarding manned approaches, the deployment of a marine vessel may be time consuming and expensive to operate. Further, because the deployment involves processing remote sensing data and the deployment may involve delays, this approach may not be able to locate the ephemeral feature, as it is not performed in a timely manner. That is, the target or feature may have aged, dissipated, or moved to a different location as a result of changes in conditions, such as currents and/or wind. In addition, a chemical associated with the target may have to involve high concentrations to be detected and may have to be at the surface to be discernable via satellite or aircraft. Also, this approach may have difficulties in addressing and overcoming limitations from noise (e.g., signal to noise ratio in processing of the data). These difficulties may be a result of the problems of determining background levels present within a certain body of water and identifying anomalies as compared to the background levels, and then to locate anthropogenic sources that may not persist over time. Thus, this approach has additional limitations.
As a result, enhancements to marine surveying approaches are needed. In particular, marine surveying may include obtaining samples of biological, hydrocarbons and/or chemicals, which may be used to enhance hydrocarbon exploration, hydrocarbon development, and/or environmental monitoring of bodies of water with one or more unmanned vehicles. The obtained samples may also provide biodiversity data at different trophic levels, through the analysis of environmental deoxyribonucleic acid (eDNA), which may provide useful information on the impact of an event or ongoing anthropomorphic features, for waterborne pathogens and for studying invasive or endangered species.